Home Or Nursing Home: America's Empty Promise To Give The Elderly And Disabled A ChoiceThere's been a quiet revolution in the way the elderly and young people with disabilities get long-term health care. Most people want that care at home and a new legal right has emerged to make that happen.

Youth In Nursing Homes Seek Alternative Care

Michelle Fridley, 33, with her cat in her apartment in Canadaigua, N.Y. Ten years ago, on the way to her baby shower, Fridley, then 23, was in a car accident that left her a quadriplegic. This year, she was crowned Miss Wheelchair New York.
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A New Nursing Home Population: The Young

Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for the civil rights division at the U.S. Department of Justice, said he is making enforcement of the Olmstead ruling a new priority for his division.
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Olivia's mom, Tamara, reads to her in the family's living room in Lincoln, Ill. Her father John and brother Brian are on the couch. Olivia Welter is 20 years old, now. She breathes with the help of the portable ventilator on the back of her wheelchair. She can't speak. She can't move. She can't even close her eyelids--her eyes are wide open.
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Families Fight To Care For Disabled Kids At Home

Katie Beckett fits herself with a vibrating vest that helps clear mucous from her lungs. A nurse comes over to her apartment in Cedar Rapids to help her do this twice a day. On the wall to the right are pictures of Katie as a child with Ronald Reagan. This story starts twenty-nine years ago with an angry President Ronald Reagan. <> We just recently received word of a little girl who has spent most of her life in a hospital. <> The little girl in the hospital was three-year-old Katie Beckett. Because of a brain infection, she needed to be hooked to a ventilator at night to breathe. Her parents wanted her home. Her doctors said she'd be better off at home. And it'd be cheaper, too: Just one-sixth the cost.
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